Theatre Aquarius in Hamilton has chosen a dark play to entertain an audience at the end of February, when people really want something lighter to blow away the winter blahs. Yet, it was a good choice because Death of a Salesman unwittingly has become the company's requiem for Arthur Miller, who died only weeks before the opening of the production. It is a play that will live on because it can be read in many ways and so will never grow old.>

When Miller wrote Death of a Salesman he was just 33 years old. The 1949 play earned him a rare triple crown in the American theatre world: the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics>'s Circle Award and the Tony Award. Heady stuff for a writer, who had until then only middling successes, and could be seen as still being at the beginning of a career. In Miller's view, Willy Loman, his main character, is the victim of the mythical American Dream. But is Willy Loman really such a victim?

We won't be able to ask Miller if he still thinks so, of course, because the great playwright died February 10 at age 89. His death has left a generation that grew up with his plays bereft of yet another literary icon, with nobody really in view who might take his place.

Watching the production of Death of a Salesman at Theatre Aquarius I was struck by how the character of Willy Loman echoes in so many dreamers I have met across the world, from Europe to Asia and, of course, still here at home in Canada. Living with self-delusion, being unable to come to grips with one's limitations, and wanting more than one is capable of achieving, is not something that is limited to North America. Yet, here dreams do come true more often than they do in other places, provided one has the right stuff to achieve them, and provided these dreams are realistic.

Willy Loman, as we meet him on the Aquarius stage, and as portrayed by Tom McBeath, strikes me as a man whose insecurities lead him into a world of self-delusion that has nothing whatsoever to do with the American Dream, but with a dysfunctional childhood. Because of this childhood he becomes a victim of needing to be liked at all costs, of living in the past, and eventually of being unable to adjust to changing times. When a character needs to lie to himself and to his family, when he betrays his wife, whether out of loneliness or because he can't check his libido, he suffers not from the mythical American Dream, but from a lack of inner strength and character.

Miller, still young when he wrote this play, lacked the knowledge gained through experience to describe Willy Loman's malady, as I see it. There is no doubt that what the playwright created in his play is a very real figure, one all too familiar if one is inclined to close observation. Miller, however, influenced by left-leaning politics and the lingering effects of the Depression, had not yet quite woken up to the realities of the world. And, because Miller spoke of the American Dream, as he saw it, literary types ever since have taken it for granted that Willy Loman is a victim of the evils of American society, of capitalist society, which makes people aspire to too much, or denies them success. It is an easy way out for us to lay the blame there. It absolves us from looking more closely at what creates a Willy Loman, and why some dreamers succeed and why others do not.

McBeath gives an excellent performance as Willy, a man who perpetuates his own shortcomings in his sons by stressing that physical prowess and good looks are more important than intellectual discipline. McBeath captured Willy's inability to listen, his need to appear to be more than he really is, and his way of putting unrealistic burdens onto his sons.

The real victim in Death of a Salesman is Biff, the older of the two boys. It is on him especially that Willy dotes. Just when life should have blossomed for Biff at age 17, it withers away because he realizes that his father is a fake. Being young, he has no way of handling this realization and he withdraws into the world of the non-achiever. When we meet Biff, portrayed with fine nuances by Graham Abbey, he is going through a slow self-realization that leads him to recognize what lies behind his failures, and in the end, he is the one who accepts reality.

His brother Happy is not so lucky. He fails to see that he is following not the road to truth but the one that is filled with the same self-delusions as those of his father's. Brendan Wall plays him with the required swagger of a womanizing salesman. In the end, one actually feels sorry for Hap, as his family calls him, when he promises, "I'm gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It's the only dream you can have — to come out number-one man." He failed to learned that his father's philosophy that personality counts more toward success than hard and steady work will lead him to eventual failure as well.

Linda, Willy's wife, unfailingly supports her husband, and closes her eyes to his exaggerations, his futile dreams, his hero-worship of his brother Ben. She is the one who holds him back when Ben offers Willy a chance to make something of himself in Alaska. At the same time, when Willy speaks about his brother or speaks to his apparition in his confused mental state, one wonders if Ben's success is perhaps more a figment of Willy's imagination than reality. Donna Belleville captures the long-suffering, repressed nature of Linda well. She is a woman who expresses herself solely through her family, having given up any personal aspirations. And the sad part about her life is that she really does not like her husband very much, yet she is utterly loyal to him.

Neighbor Charley, played by Sven van de Ven, takes pity on Willy and offers him a job (twice, in fact) because the traveling salesman shows the wear and tear of his job. Van de Ven handles this scene well. It is a difficult one because Charley knows that Willy is actually jealous of him. His son Bernard, played by Graeme Somerville, achieves the success that Willy had hoped for Biff. It is Bernard who pinpoints the time to when Biff changed and lost all ambition.